Thing 20.0

I decided to do this Thing "by the book." In my library I find that the anatomy books and National Geographic magazine nudes do the best with the young rapscallions. Why does the dictionary always fall right open to the word hermaphrodite? I do think that the physical book will be hard to replace...most patrons who are big readers will not want to duplicate that experience on the web. E-books, for example, have not been a big hit and tend to be most useful for academic, research-oriented reading where it is useful to scan a title for particular sections or search for specific keywords. In that way, an e-book can be even better than a physical volume. However, the actual fiction and novel reader does not want this...they do love the audiobooks but don't want to read on a screen. Some version of a print-on-demand service which could produce cheap paperback copies of brand-new titles would be a big hit, but would kill the hardcover profits for the publishers and authors. It would also kill my practice of tiling the floor of my yurt with romance novel covers.

I checked out Overbooked, Wired For Books, Librivox, and Worldcat. Overbooked was a bit underwhelming...the site had moved to a new address. I found it to be difficult to navigate and find actual documents. Many links did not go where they indicated (like nonfiction) and I was only able to find excel spreadsheets instead of html lists, which is annoying. You have to open the file and view in a separate window and it doesn't display well. Wired For Books was actually quite good...very interesting niche for a site. This could be very useful for programming or library website features to add the actual voice of an author. Those audio clips can be hard to locate, especially in a central location. Librivox is another very interesting site, featuring volunteers reading public domain titles as audiobooks. Easy to search and find things. This can potentially open up older works, particularly individual titles that are not an author's best-selling or most famous work, to the audiobook patron. I did not see a listing for my self-published biography, Siberian Circe. I was hoping to find a version of it read by Fran Drescher wearing a nose plug. But 'twas not meant to be. Worldcat is a library standby, used for ILL requests and title info, and a good source for reviews also.